Lord Jesus, what do You want to say to me about the way You love Yourself and the way You want me to love myself?
My darling, today I want to take you to the book of Revelation and talk about how the story ends.
Is there any self-hatred in heaven?
No Lord, I think that there cannot be self-hatred in heaven, for there is no more pain or crying and “the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
Exactly. So when you ask for My will “on earth as it is in heaven,” you are asking for no more self-hatred or cruelty to self.
What about hell? It is a place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:12). Does that sound like self-hatred?
Yes, it does. It sounds like an endless torment of regret, of wishing they had done something differently and now it’s too late.
So self hatred is a feature of hell and features of heaven are…
Repentance, cleanness, joy, and gazing at God (Revelation 21-22).
Remember “the sorrow that leads to death” versus “the godly sorrow that leads to repentance without regret” (2 Corinthians 7:10)? In the end, the one sorrow is heaven and the other is hell.
So what I’m asking you to do now is practice the heaven sorrow (which is wiped away) and not the hell sorrow. I want you to practice heaven and not practice hell. You aren’t going to “live” in hell so why should you practice living there? You are going to live in heaven, and so you should practice living there.
A huge part of the torment of hell is self-torment, is “Why didn’t you…? I wish I had…? How could I…? If only I had…?” These are some of the torture instruments of hell. You have tasted them on the earth but you don’t need to taste them again. That’s part of why I react so strongly when you talk to yourself like that, because that is how people talk to themselves in hell, without Jesus.
Jesus died to save you–and Adam and Eve and everybody–from that. From regret. To give you a godly sorrow to lead to repentance without regret. Godly sorrow and repentance are not incompatible with self-love (the good kind). But the sorrow that leads to death is self-hatred and it involves pride. And it is too late. And it torments by regret.
People in hell are looking at the past to see what they could and should and would have done differently and flagellating themselves with it, and people in heaven are looking forward to see the next new good thing that I will do! And you have a choice now between those two perspectives: you too can look back to see what you could or should or would have done differently and flagellate yourself with it, or you can look forward to see the next new good thing that I will do. Do you want to play hell or play heaven? I want you to play heaven!
The people in hell are looking at themselves and the people in heaven are looking at Me, that is true. But it is also true that the people in hell are looking at themselves with hatred and if they looked at Me, it would be with hatred too. And the people in heaven are looking at Me with love and if they do think of themselves, it is with love too. Those are the two positions. Those are the only two positions in the end. And I am fighting tooth and nail to prepare you for one of them and not the other. Even now.
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